Giving Life To Life Stories Is Goal For Budding Autobiographers

January 13, 1986|By Moira Bailey, Orlando Sentinel.

ORLANDO, FLA. — Florence Sapinkopf lives with her husband, Hank, in a retirement community here. The peaceful neighborhood, laid out in a well-ordered grid, is a far cry from the small corner of Trenton, N.J., where the 62-year-old woman grew up. That neighborhood was a self-contained community of Jewish immigrants who had created a Middle European niche for themselves in the United States.

For years after she left for career, marriage and a new life in New York, Sapinkopf didn`t think much about her hometown. Trenton represented the old way of life she had desperately wanted to escape as a girl.

Today, it`s almost all she can talk--and write--about. Sapinkopf is bringing the neighborhood`s unique sounds, smells, colors and characters back to life, through autobiographical essays.

Sapinkopf started writing about three years ago, when a group of her community`s residents gathered in their clubhouse for a class taught by Ron Fowler, a junior college instructor. Sapinkopf discovered that she was most comfortable writing in the first-person. She found that one memory triggered another, and that her past started to trickle back in vivid detail.

``Our street seemed to have a life of its own,`` Sapinkopf wrote in one of several narratives she has compiled over the years. ``In my childish imagination, it began throbbing with activity at the first ray of daylight as our fathers hurried to the synagogue for early morning prayers.

``It continued throughout the day with wave after wave of movement, starting with the truck drivers banging their boxes on the narrow stairs as they delivered baskets of produce, crates of chickens and barrels of sour pickles to the stores up and down the street.``

Her typewritten stories, now stashed in a blue folder, tell about her father`s death, her oldest brother, her working days in Brooklyn, the memory of winter chill and mother`s cocoa, the pain of leaving her New York home for Florida.

The memories sometimes return when Sapinkopf least expects them. Some spring from idle chatter with her husband, such as a recent discussion of ice cubes that led to her full-blown childhood remembrance of carting home blocks of ice in an orange-crate wagon.

``I do find that if I just sit still and think about it, things come to me,`` Sapinkopf said.

That is basically the way any nonprofessional writer should approach writing his or her life story, according to a Missouri professor who has published a how-to manual on the subject.

Lois Daniel, who teaches courses at colleges in Kansas and Missouri, tells her students to begin by writing whatever event or memory is uppermost in their minds and to worry about chronology later. A writer determined to chronicle everything from birth will probably get discouraged by what seems an overwhelming task, said Daniel, whose own autobiography is not finished. Her book, ``How To Write Your Own Life Story`` (paperback, Chicago Review Press, $8.95), is in its second edition.

The reasons for writing an autobiography are as varied as life experiences.

``People who want to do it for their grandchildren top the list,`` said the 63-year-old Daniel. Others try at the insistence of children or grandchildren who want to see a family history in story form.

One of Daniel`s students wanted to write about her mother, who had raised five children by herself as a single parent. Daniel suggested the woman interview her mother by telephone.

``This mother is so thrilled,`` Daniel said. ``I think she had just worked steadily (all her life), never thinking that anyone would care about her stories or her struggle.``

Daniel said she has seen a surprising number of students, especially younger people, who want to write their life stories as an exercise in self-discovery. She added that several psychologists have ordered her book for use in therapy.

Sapinkopf, who is not writing specifically for posterity (she has no children), said she has learned much about her close ties to other family members through writing about them.

``The things that I took for granted, I realized that it wasn`t just something that happened that I worked at it,`` Sapinkopf said. ``Being with the family, getting to know them and understand them. It was something that I really worked hard at over the years.``

Daniel lists several major category assignments as guidelines, including: birth, parents, school, holidays, failure and hope, illnesses and remedies, religion, talents, love, food, turning points in your life, family traditions, the accomplishment of which you are most proud.

An aspiring autobiographer should buy two loose-leaf notebooks, Daniel said. One should be reserved for writing and the other for jotting down remembrances of things past as they surface.

``It`s a very good way to get people to write meaningfully,`` said author Sloan Wilson, who teaches writing in the Orlando area. ``If you`re not interested in your own past or your own self, I don`t think you can be interested in much of anything.``